The old debate question that helped put Ronald Reagan in the White House three decades ago -- "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" -- is being dusted off with a twist by Barack Obama. But the query is less likely in itself to be a winner for him in November the way it was for Reagan.

In the president's kick-off 2012 campaign speech at Ohio State the other day, he predicted that his opponents will be pounding him with television ads "that will tell you that America is down and out, and they'll tell you who to blame and ask you if you're better off than you were before the worst crisis in our lifetime."

Of that pitch, Obama said: "We've seen that play before. ... The real question -- the question that will actually make a difference in your life and in the lives of your children -- is not just about how we're doing today. It's about how we'll be doing tomorrow." He proceeded to offer his vision of what America will be if the voters allow him to move on with his unfinished business of righting the economy and propping up a middle class that is under assault.

In other words, instead of griping about the slowness of the progress we're making in recovering from the mess he inherited in 2009, he was saying, Americans will be better off -- not to mention his own political legacy -- by remembering how the country got where it was then, and looking ahead to where he wants it to be.

As valid as Obama's assessment may be as to where we are today and how we got here, the problem is that he tried the same pitch diligently two years ago in the midterm congressional elections, and it failed abysmally.

Endlessly, at Ohio State, he offered again a version of his 2010 metaphor of how the previous Republican administration drove the American car into a ditch, and how Republicans in Congress then refused to help haul it out, put it back on the road and get it running again. For all his sermonizing then, what he got for his troubles was opposition-party control of the House of Representatives and a larger minority in the Senate.

As a result, Obama had to spend his next nearly two years, first, attempting to appease the further emboldened congressional Republicans in stalemates on debt reduction and tax policy, and then accepting the political reality of their obstructionism. That, and having to relive the health-care reform fight over again amid the GOP clamor for repeal of "Obamacare."

In his Ohio State speech, the president made a lengthy effort to fire up the faithful to the red-hot level of his winning 2008 campaign, even resurrecting his old call for "change you can believe in," which the Republicans have duly noted has not occurred, particularly in the deepening Washington partisanship.

He gave his supporters another pep talk on grass-roots campaigning, telling them there's "nothing more powerful than millions of voices calling for change. When enough of you knock on doors, when you pick up phones, when you talk to your neighbors, when you decide that it's time for change, guess what? Change happens. Change comes to America."

The cheerleader-in-chief went on: "If people ask you what this campaign is about, you tell them it's still about hope, you tell them it's still about change." And he talked at length again about his aspirations for education, clean energy, better fuel economy, the end of the two wars, tax code reform and "a forward-looking America ... not just about what we're doing today. It's about what we'll be doing tomorrow."

What's foremost on Americans' minds now, however, is precisely what's being done today, to create jobs for the millions who are unemployed and underemployed right now. Obama had little specific to say new about that.

Arguing that the reason Americans voters are not better off now because of the mistakes and bad judgments of his predecessors didn't fly two years ago. Reminding them of that contention again isn't likely to blunt the present complaint that he isn't doing enough right now to put Americans back to work.